The haunting beauty of Mozart's Requiem and the tragic circumstances surrounding its composition have made it a favorite among performers and listeners alike. But how much of it actually Mozart's - and how do we know? Who wrote the missing pieces? What role did his wife, Constanze, play - and what about the man who secretly commissioned the work? Who tricked whom, and who had the last laugh in this grim tale? The author, an internationally recognized expert on Mozart, traces the complex web of events and intrigue surrounding the composition of the Requiem and how it was completed after Mozart's death. In an easy-to-read style, he presents an accurate, precise, complete narrative of the dramatic story; and with a spoonful of sugar, he introduces newcomers to some of the technical problems, clues, and terminology used in reconstructing such histories.
I have often heard people express their wish that someone who has died would return to us and relate what the life-death-rebirth experience is really like. Well, someone has! This is exactly what Beethoven does in my third novel, Beethoven, Then and Now. Like Beethoven, each one of us is the proud possessor of a human soul. This clearly defined object is none other than our very own spiritual subelectron. Our physical hulk is only a pile of ashes; but our soul (spiritual subelectron) is unique, eternal, indestructible. Because of its high vibrations, Beethovens soul is immediately attracted to the third subelectronic ring of our First-Second-Order universe. Here it awaits rebirth via fusion with the spiritual subelectron of a Major-Order being within our Second-Order-Major universe. Paul Rezler (age seventeen) is the fortunate recipient of this unbelievable prize. He had awakened to the day at hand with his usual zero interest in music. Now (1827 Earth-time) he is the greatest Earth- musician yet to live. Try as Beethoven does, he cannot adjust to the Second-Order reality of corporate composers, not even to being the absolute leader of the Beethoven Corporation. He must be entirely on his own-- a single man vs. the world! Counselor Robinson does his best in selecting a Subsidiary culture which contains a Vienna as close as possible to the one which Beethoven had left behind upon his Earthly death. Within a month, our hero makes his translation and enjoys living where theres not the trace of anything resembling a musical corporation. Sketches for new third-period works begin to flow: a piano sonata, a string quartet, a piano trio, a violin concerto, even some encouraging vibrations of Symphony 10. A handful of piano and violin students emerges, including an exceptional young lady named Anna Rosecranz, who is already a master of these instruments. Her musicianship is so strong that they soon fall in love and are married. How they enjoy performing concerts together! In time, as Beethoven works at his composers desk, she starts peering over his shoulder. She begs him for lessons in composition. He replies, I compose, and AM NOT a teacher of composition! This declaration does not frighten her away. As Beethoven fumbles and bumbles his way from sketchbook to finished score, Anna carefully watches each step of the process. Her comments are invaluable: Use a pedal-point here. Not so dissonant a chord.. Pure melody would fit here. Please, not so sustained. Too many notes in the melody. Avoid more of this rhythm. Two-voice counterpoint would do. Too much for the brass here. This use of strings is perfect. Thanks to Anna, Beethoven accomplishes the impossible. He realizes that he works far better with her help than without it. He now loves to share the very process which only yesterday had demanded his total aloofness. As if by magic, he is now prepared to return to Major-Order life as managing partner in charge of the Beethoven Corporation. But considering all that Anna has done for him, he cannot now simply go his own way. As a Subsidiary being, her lifespan is a mere 100 years, compared to his Second-Order-Major span of 1000 years. Being happily married, he plans to share life for the balance of her days. But Fate has his own plan for their lives. After all their years of loving and sharing, Anna is killed in an automobile accident. When Beethoven returns to the Major Order, a super surprise awaits him. There stands Anna Rosecranz, a full Major-Second-Order being, with whom he can share the rest of their 1000 years in joyful creative activity. His first question: On Earth, who were you, my dear? Her reply causes our hero to faint for the second time in his entire Second-Order life!
'Late style' is a critical term routinely deployed to characterise the work of selected authors, composers, and creative artists as they enter their last phase of production—often, but not only, in old age. Taken at face value, this terminology merely points to a chronological division in the artist's oeuvre, 'late' being the antonym of 'early' or the third term in the triad 'early-middle-late'. However, almost from its inception, the idea of late style or late work has been freighted with aesthetic associations and expectations that promote it as a special episode in the artist's creative life. Late style is often characterised as the imaginative response made by exceptional talents to the imminence of their death. In their confrontation with death creative artists, critics claim, produce work that is by turns a determination to continue while strength remains, a summation of their life's work and a radical vision of the essence of their craft. And because this creative phenomenon is understood as primarily an existential response to a common fate, so late style is understood as something that transcends the particularities of place, time and medium. Critics seeking to understand late work regularly invoke the examples of Titian, Goethe, and Beethoven as exemplars of what constitutes late work, proposing that something unites the late style of authors, composers, and creative artists who otherwise would not be bracketed together and that lateness per se is a special order of creative work. The essays in this collection resist this position. Ranging across literature, the visual arts, music, and scientific work, the material assembled here looks closely at the material, biographical and other contexts in which the work was produced and seeks both to question the assumptions surrounding late style and to prompt a more critical understanding of the last works of writers, artists and composers.
Our image of Beethoven has been transformed by the research generated by a succession of scholars and theorists who blazed new trails from the 1960s onwards. This collection of articles written by leading Beethoven scholars brings together strands of this mainly Anglo-American research over the last fifty years and addresses a range of key issues. The volume places Beethoven scholarship within a historical and contemporary context and considers the future of Beethoven studies.
Wilfrid Mellers ranks among the most eminent of contemporary British writers and lecturers on music. The range of his interest is exceptionally wide, encompassing music from the renaissance to the present day, from Monteverdi to Minimalism, not excluding jazz and many different forms of popular music, as well as music from non-western cultures. That breadth of vision is nowhere more apparent than in his occasional writings. In these necessarily concentrated and closely focused pieces we find the essence of his thinking about music, its nature and its meaning. Written in the first instance for the general reader, they also offer insights that should be of importance to music students in schools, colleges, and universities.
Influenced by Robert and Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, Johannes Brahms not only learned to play the organ at the beginning of his career, but also wrote significant compositions for the instrument as a result of his early counterpoint study. He composed for the organ only sporadically or as part of larger choral and instrumental works in his subsequent career. During the final year of his life, however, he returned to pure organ composition with a set of chorale preludes--though many of these are thought to have been revisions of earlier works. Today, the organ works of Johannes Brahms are recognized as beautifully-crafted compositions by church and concert organists across the world and have become a much-cherished component of the repertoire. Until now, however, most scholarly accounts of Brahms's life and work treat his works for the organ as a minor footnote in his development as a composer.Precisely because the collection of organ works is not extensive, the pieces--composed at different times during Brahms's lifetime--help to map his path as a composer, pinpointing various stages in his artistic development. In this volume, Barbara Owen offers the first in-depth study of this corpus, considering Brahms's organ works in relation to his background, methods, and overall artistic development, his contacts with organs and organists, the influence of his predecessors and contemporaries, and analyses of each specific work and its place in Brahms's career. Her expert history and analysis of Brahms's individual organ works and their interpretation also investigates contemporary practices relative to the performance of these pieces. The book's three valuable appendices present a guide to editions of Brahms's organ works, a discussion of the organ in Brahms's world that highlights some organs the composer would have heard, and a listing of the organ transcriptions of Brahms's work.Blending unique insights into composition and performance practice, this book will be read eagerly by performers, students, and scholars of the organ, Brahms, and the music of the Nineteenth Century.
When Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) completed the vast opera Saint Frans dAssise in 1983, he was mentally and physically exhausted, and believed that this monumental work would be his final compositional statement. In fact, he completed seven further works, and these form the focus of the present study. Christopher Dingle suggests that, following the crisis provoked by the opera, Messiaen's music underwent a discernible change in style. He examines these seven works to identify characteristics of the composer's music, in particular an often overlooked aspect of his technique: harmony. Part I of the book begins with a brief historical survey before discussing Saint Frans dAssise as the work which defines everything that follows. Part II examines the series of miniatures that came after the opera and their links with lairs sur lAu-Del., his final masterpiece. lairs forms the subject of Part III of the book. Each movement is analysed in turn, before the work is considered as a whole and its hidden structure and motivic cohesion is revealed. Finally, Part IV considers the incomplete Concert and key stylistic features of the works of Messiaens final years.
Mellers (composer and professor emeritus, University of York) begins with the confusion of the (unfamiliar) forest within, audible in Wagner's late and Shoenberg's early works, in Delius's A Village Romeo and Juliet, and Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande. The next section, The Forest Without, examines Charles Koechlin's Le Foret Feerique and Milhaud's Le Boeuf Sur le Toit which embrace the real jungle without and the imaginative jungle within. Part 3 shows Villa-Lobos and Carlos Chavez connecting, as Mellers puts it, "the jungle within the mind and the asphalt jungle of a rapidly industrialized metropolis." Part four explores interrelationships between wilderness and machine through the work of Carl Ruggles, Varese, Partch, Reich, and the Australian, Peter Sculthorpe. Finally, the erasure of border between wilderness and civilization is the focus in works by Ellington and Gershwin. Suitable for both musicians and non-musicians. c. Book News Inc.
